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Show contend that Hoover saw it as a threat to his power. But Hoover always had a healthy distaste for the surreptitious and a distrust for grandiose security plans. In the 1940's, for example, he turned down the job of coordinating military and domestic counter-espionag"This country," he said, "doesn't need a Himmler." Almost everyone agrees that if the hard-nose- d Hoover had been around, there King: 19 would have been no Watergate coverup. The White House exasperation over his opposition to the internal security plan was expressed in one of the Watergate documents. "At some point," wrote White House aide Tom Charles Huston, "Hoover has to be told who is President." e. matic of a society gone sour. He felt his own life was threatened d radicals. One of his by with hair down neighbors, a teen-agto his shoulders, said the FBI chief wouldn't leave his bulletproof limousine to enter his home when longhaired youths were in the streets. long-haire- er mg. jailbreak at the cost of four lives. He looked upon her as a traitor to America. and warned that the Communists sought to make her a martyr. Yet he would have disapproved of her subsequent acquittal, which stripped her of martyrdom. Hoover spent his last days at the same routine he had always followed. At precisely 8:30 each morning, he climbed into his limousine, hunched down in the back seat on the right side and propped his hat up on the left side. En route to FBI headquarters, the black Cadillac pulled behind an apartment building to pick up his lifelong companion, Clyde Tolson. This daily little drama was executed with such stealth that the doorman didn't even know Tolson was a tenant. to permissiveness. During the last month of his life, he was heard to grump about such evils as Dr. Benjamin Spock and hedonism. He also blamed the rise in radicalism on the courts, which he felt were too lenient. Those who listened to him philosophize say he remained an implacable "tar," 1.4 mg. mcotine; Super Kino 19 mg. tar,' 1.5 mg. nicotine av. per cigarette, FTC Report (Feb. 73. Staying power The word was whispered that President Nixon was about to ask the durable old bureaucrat to retire. But like other Presidents who may have wished to replace him, Nixon thought better of it. For nearly five decades John Edgar Hoover cast a giant shadow over Washington. "He had that quality," said Senate Watergate Chairman Sam Ervin (D., N.C.), "that one's friends call firmness and one's enemies call obstinacy." It was a quality he had to the end. His last days were filled, appropriately, with the controversy that had surrounded him throughout his career. The bootleggers and gangsters of the 1920's had given way to the skyjackers and revolutionaries of the 1970's. But the old man kept up on the big cases until May 2, 1972, the day he died. Finding suspects week before the end, his agents nabbed five reputed Mafia figures from the notorious Joseph Colombo family at their hideout in upstate New York. Other agents trackfed down a law enforcement student and charged him in a Jaring $500,000 rtion-parachute skyjacking of a United Airlines jet. The FBI recovered all but $30 of the loot. Hoover followed these cases closely, his former associates recall. But his greatest concern during his final days, they remember, was the epidemic of police assaults. Attacks on policemen had reached 6000 per month. Dozens had been gunned down in the streets. To the old lawman, this was sympto A -- Hoover's salad Shortly before noon, the two aging crime fighters slipped quietly into the Rib Room of the Ma "flower Hotel for a quick, lunch. They had a standing order, which was served as soon as they sat down. Hoover always ate grapefruit and cottage cheese salad. At the office, Hoover followed the developments of the big FBI investigations and the construction of the new FBI building that now bears his name. It would be, he told everyone, "the West Point of law enforcement." He would return home early in the afternoon, putter in his garden and romp with his two small cairn terriers.' The colonial house, overlookverdant ing Washington's Rock Creek Park, was loaded with memorabilia, ranging from a bronze bust of himself in the foyer to an antique atstereo with a color-soun- d tachment. The walls were covered with fading photographs, the floors with Oriental rugs. te Cleaning, sanding, painting. Tedious job. But now, you can relax with the flavor only one cigarette delivers... full-bodi- ed ''Jiv'ri' r This...ls the moment Ns RICH, RICH CM His mother's mark Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. exto- But it was the new attitudes, say his friends, that caused him the most grief. Newspapers that once praised him began turning against him as he grew old in the job. Youngsters who once looked up to FBI agents began to scoff at them and to seek Abbie Hoffman's autograph rather than his own. laid the cause The crusty old foe of communism to the end. He was disturbed over President Nixon's approaches to Peking, distrustful of the 's smile on Mao face. Hoover's anxiety over communism, friends recall, seemed to become personified in Angela Davis. She was an avowed Communist who then faced trial for allegedly aiding a California Tse-tung- There were few women in Hoover's life, but the one who had the most lasting impact was his mother. After his father died, Hoover brought his invalid mother into his home and for years provided her with devoted g care. A fundamentalist, Annie Hoover taught her son the Spartan virtues that he adhered to all his life. His personal secretary, Miss Helen Gandy, was as devoted to the FBI director as he was to his mother. She God-fearin- continued . 7 |